The Bulldogs went from NRL powerhouse to the laughing stock of the league almost overnight. As they emerge from their salary cap hell after five years in the wilderness, their passionate fans are daring to dream once again. In the second part of the Herald’s investigation into the rise, fall and rebirth of the Bu
You could see the steam coming from Ray Dib as he made his way down from the chairman’s lounge to the dressing room underneath ANZ Stadium.
A 38-0 shellacking at the hands of Penrith, the club’s fourth loss on the trot, came just two months after the board begrudgingly extended Des Hasler’s contract during the 2017 season.
Dib was irate. He approached Hasler and asked to speak to the players alone. The chairman wanted answers.
“I said: ‘Ray, are you sure you know what you’re doing here?’,” Hasler recalls.
“I advised against it and said, ‘I think I should be here’. It was more protecting Ray and protecting the team. From my experiences, this was not how you do these things. It was too emotional. But I didn’t want to create a scene in front of the players, so I stepped out.”
Dib recalls it differently.
“He didn’t say that,” Dib said. “I asked him to leave and I whispered in his ear saying, ‘Trust me, this is in your best interest for the players to be up front if there are any concerns they might have’.”
“That week I already had two senior player managers advise me of the concerns of their clients losing faith in Des Hasler’s coaching style.
“And in the lifts on the way down to the sheds, people who had expressed interest in major sponsorships and a third-party player deal said to me: ‘Sorry Ray, we’re going to leave it for this year’.”
Dib reminded the players of the sponsors they were about to lose after they plummeted to 14th on the ladder.
“F— your sponsors,” one player stood up and yelled as his teammates watched on in shock.
“My heart was beating,” Josh Reynolds, who didn’t even play that game due to injury, confessed. “It was probably the scariest thing I’ve ever done to stand up to our chairman.”
But when we’re sitting there after losing four in a row, him coming in and questioning us, telling Des to leave – it was all a bit too much. To this day, I felt I had earned the right to speak up, given how long I’d been at that club.
“I’ve known Ray for a long time. I played with his son when we were kids. I looked up to Ray. I still do. But I said, ‘We’re in here, we’re the ones copping all this and you’re worried about everyone else. Why don’t you worry about us.’
“Look, I understand what the sponsors mean to the game. They are everything. But at that time, we had just been flogged from pillar to post. Journos were writing shit about us, no one coming to our games and had sponsors leaving.
“Really, I shouldn’t say that to my boss, but still, to this day, I don’t regret saying that. When you’re in a bad place like we were, we didn’t need to hear that.”
For Dib, it’s a moment he’s not proud of.
“It’s the biggest regret of my time at the club,” he admits.
The emotion inside the sheds on that Sunday afternoon in June was heightened by the fact a number of players, including Reynolds and James Graham, who opted not to comment, were being shown the door.
It wasn’t the first time players were bemused by the decisions being made by those calling the shots.
The players loved him. The kids of the players loved him (he is godfather to three of them).
Most importantly, the fans adored him, largely because the feeling was mutual.
Two nights before the 2012 grand final, Reynolds – having heard the drums and noise from his Belmore home – drove down the main street of town with his window up and hoodie over his head.
Is that Reynolds?” a young Bulldogs fan yelled.
“I promise you, within 10 seconds, 100 people surrounded the car, they opened the door and picked me up on their shoulders,” Reynolds recalls.
“They were playing the drums, shoved a microphone in my face and started telling me to yell stuff out. There I was, two nights before the grand final, shitting myself that Des was going to find out.
“I miss it. I miss being the Prince of Belmore. It’s f—ing silly even calling me that, but that’s how I felt. I loved it. I have been chasing that feeling ever since. It was the best time of my life.
“What the club and the fans and the area have done for my life – I’ll never be able to repay them. I’ll always be a Bulldog.
The Bulldogs, too, have struggled to recover from the cultural void Reynolds left when he took the big money at the Wests Tigers after he was made a low offer by the Bulldogs.
“When he left, it wasn’t the Bulldogs any more,” hooker Michael Lichaa says.
Todd Greenberg has long held the view that chief executives who take on a job with the head coach already in place will never have as much authority as those who appoint the coach.
“It makes your job 1000 times harder,” he says.
The Canterbury CEO Raelene Castle was caught between a rock and a hard place. She believed in Hasler, despite those on the inside feeling the coach was taking advantage of her loyalty.
However, her boss was at loggerheads with the coach and viewed Castle’s perceived allegiance to Hasler as a betrayal of the board’s trust.
“It’s not true, I was absolutely prepared to sack Des if that was what the board agreed,” Castle says. “Sacking a coach comes with the role of CEO.”
It all came to a head at a board meeting at the end of the 2016 season. Dib and the board, who felt it was unrealistic for Hasler to ask for a contract extension 22 months out from the expiration of his deal, ignored the advice of the CEO.
“I went to the board and said, ‘You either have to re-sign him today or sack him today – any other option is when the uncertainty will start causing us issues’,” Castle says.
“I’d done the financial analysis and presented the options on who we could get to replace him. I said to them we either go down that path or we re-sign Des, because the moment you don’t do either of those things you’ll lose all the player managers with the uncertainty.
“Not making the decision then was absolutely, in my mind, a pivotal moment in the trajectory of the club.”
Dib says the board, by that point, had lost faith in Castle’s recommendations.
“She wanted to extend Des 22 months out from his contract end date,” Dib said of Castle. “She also wanted to extend [development manager, Noel] Cleal’s contract when it was clear to all of us he was struggling to develop any players into first graders. He didn’t reach any of his KPIs in four years. Des begged me to keep Cleal on board and Raelene backed him but the board had lost trust in her judgment by then.”
Hasler has always been stubborn. Before the 2014 grand final he wasn’t impressed with the song and dance South Sydney were making about ringing the foundation bell before they ran on to the field.
